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We investigated experimentally and theoretically the buildup of light pulses in an erbium-doped sub-MHz all-fiber laser modelocked by nonlinear polarization rotation. We were able to study the buildup of two different emission regimes: standard solitons and noise-like pulses. In each case, we were able to determine the round-trips required to achieve a stable emission state. Temporal traces and optical spectra of single pulses were measured along the start-up transient of the laser. The experimental results were also confirmed by numerical simulations. Under the specific conditions of this laser, the soliton regime takes about 400 round-trips to reach single-pulse emission. In the noise-like pulse regime, it takes only 20 round-trips for the characteristics of noise-like pulses to show up; although a more steady-state emission is reached also at about 400 round-trips.

In this work, we present a passively modelocked all-fiber laser that fully retains polarization with a fundamental repetition rate of 1 GHz. The whole cavity consists of a 106 mm-long highly-Tm-doped polarization-maintaining fiber with a dichroic mirror on one end and a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror on the other. We experimentally characterized the output of this laser, which emits a train of transform-limited light pulses with a temporal width of 520 fs at the central optical wavelength of 1.96 μ m. The high stability of this laser was also experimentally verified. Together with this, a detailed theoretical model was developed, confirming the experimental results.